Habari ya leo? Swahili is one of the most spoken African languages and we’re now making it much easier for the over 100 million Swahili speakers to search for things they care about. When someone conducts a search, they want answers as quickly as possible. To help Swahili speakers discover new information more easily, we’re now making the Google Knowledge Graph available in Swahili. So next time a Swahili user is searching for Nobel Peace Prize winner Wangari Maathai, we’ll show them things, not strings – and they’ll instantly get information that’s relevant to their query such as Wangari’s date of birth, her awards, or related books about her.

The image on the right hand side shows you the new search experience pulling information from the Knowledge Graph

The Knowledge Graph enables you to search for things, people or places that Google knows about—landmarks, celebrities, cities, sports teams, buildings, geographical features, movies, celestial objects, works of art and more. It’s not just rooted in public sources such as Freebase, Wikipedia and the CIA World Factbook, it’s also augmented at a much larger scale—because we’re focused on comprehensive breadth and depth. The Knowledge Graph is currently available in 59 languages, mapping out how more than 1 billion things in the real world are connected, and over 70 billion facts about them. And it’s tuned based on what people search for, and what we find out on the web, improving results over time.

We’ve now rolled out the Knowledge Graph in Swahili to users around the world. We hope that this update will make Search an even better experience for the millions of Swahili speakers in East Africa.